From undimensioned spheres the Old Ones swept down to primal Earth and beneath their mighty tread all creation bowed. In their multitudes they bred and spawned abominations, which flew or flopped or crept into Earth's every pore. Wantonly they trod dark ways, cavorting in the steaming fens of the new-made land, until all the planet had known the touch of the Old Ones' hand. But upon their wickedness the Elder Gods did gaze.......

Across the ravaged Earth these ancient Gods waged war and The Old Ones were imprisoned or locked in deathless dream, not in the spaces known to man, but in the angles inbetween. But Earth has known them once and will know of them once more. Now they lie sleeping in their tombs, but when constellations turn, with the passing of strange aeons; the Old Ones shall return!

THE NECRONOMICON

Words by Steve Lines. Music by Childe Roland. Childe Roland: Vocals and all instruments.

I know not who might find this note, as I write here in my room, gripped in a fevered madness and waiting for my doom. If only I had turned aside and not been compelled to look inside that cursed library where I saw the book.

Its touch was warm and leprous but it drew me like a flame, an unholy attraction which I could not explain. Heavy, old and leather bound, cracked and worn with age. I breathed the stench of dark decay as I turned another page

Vast gulfs there are that yawn beyond the Gates of which we dream, the Old Ones wait and watch the stars in spaces in-between. And Cthulhu dreams in R'lyeh, imprisoned in the deeps, but in death He does not die Cthulhu only sleeps.

There are things that mortal man was not meant to know. The ravings of an Arab poet have blasted my soul. There's a seething, writhing madness clawing at my brain. I'll put down my pen, pick up the gun and forever still the pain.

THE TELEGRAM

Words by Ramsey Campbell. Ramsey Campbell: Voice. Steve Lines: FX.

(Words used by kind permission of Ramsey Campbell.)

"Come at once to Kingsport. You are needed urgently by me here for protection from agencies which may kill me - or worse - if you do not come immediately. Will explain as soon as you reach me."

"But what is this Thing that flops unspeakably down the passage toward this room? It cannot be that abomination which I met in the nitrous vaults below Asquith Place..... Ia Yog-Sothoth, Cthulhu fhtagn!"

Words by Steve Lines. Music by Childe Roland. Childe Roland: Vocals and all instruments.

With the aid of strange drugs I went back through time, the walls they slowly vanished, my eyes began to see: the veil of illusion fell, I stepped beyond the line. I existed in all men and all men in me.

I went back through weird curves and angles: an abyss of being where no man should ever be. I saw what lies beyond, where dark dimensions tangle, but I went too far and I never will be free.

I can hear them breathing, I can hear them howl. The Hounds of Tindalos are on the prowl. Through outrageous angles, they scented me in Time. The Hounds of Tindalos, horrors so sublime..

In a silence that shrieked, in a light that was not light, that's when I saw them, those foul and loathsome hounds - ravenous and snarling with their hungry blazing eyes. That's when I broke free and fled their snarling sounds.

Now I am waiting, waiting for my doom and I can hear them baying beyond dimension's door. I sit beside the window and watch the angles of my room, for the curves that would protect me have fallen to the floor.

On wings of alchemy I chased the past through ebb and flow of all humanity, beheld Atlantis vanquished by the sea, then backward further still - until at last the simplest cells winked out of sight as angled time replaced the purer curve of mundane being.

Stricken to the nerve, I glanced about in a light that was not light and found myself upon the other side: that ghost-grey shore where silence writhes and shrieks, where there is never anywhere to hide. A wind is rising now that steams and reeks like daemon’s breath....... dear God, I know those sounds...... the nightmare baying of Tind'losi Hounds!

DREAMHOUND

Words by Steve Lines. Music by Brian Voth. Brian Voth: Vocals and all instruments.

I saw the starving demon hound with orbs of lambent flame. A nameless wind caressed his coarse and matted hide as he turned his eyes towards me and snarling, screamed my name; his snout was all aquiver with the scent of humankind!

It seemed as if the aether did moan and howl and shriek. Terror gripped my soul as my spirit body fled before the baying of that dreamhound. I was tired and weak when, from fevered delirium, I awakened in my bed.

You say it was a nightmare but can't you hear the sound, out there in the twilight, the faint baying of a hound?

HOME

Words by Simon Clark. Simon Clark: Voice. Steve Lines: Keyboards, FX.

(Words used by kind permission of Simon Clark.)

Behind the Fox twins came more.

A drowned pilot wrapped in a rotting parachute like a funeral shroud.

Then a boy who'd swam too far out twenty summers before, now bulbous-headed with hands the size of footballs.

Following him a fisherman with a monstrous growth erupting from his throat; as big as a beachball, it was stretched so tight you thought it would burst with every step he took. Then came the accountant, Wainright, walking a different kind of step now, the white bandage still hanging round his neck; from his smashed mouth a growth the size of a tennis ball and as red as a strawberry budded out. In the nightmare Chris's mind zoomed in on every detail.

Then came more men, with heads that looked as if they had been formed out of beef - red-raw and moist - which shook and quivered with every step.

Behind him, six men who had drowned in the same small boat. They had become welded together by the explosive growth of flesh to form a single creature with bent legs. It moved like a crab scraping a furrow in the beach. Thank Christ it's only a dream.

They reached the causeway and crossed it.

He sensed they had one purpose. One single craving.

They all wanted to go home. Whatever remained of their minds must have mumbled the same word like an incantation.

Well I can hear them talking again tonight from the shadows in the darkened trees, singing their song in the pale moonlight, carried on the evening breeze. The end is near and they want my soul, they're coming down from the hills. Can you hear the call of the whippoorwills?

Late last year about this time my brother passed away. The birds were singing then as well, at the end of the day. He said they wanted to catch his soul and if they failed their song would still. Can you hear the call of the whippoorwills?

They whistle in time with my breathing now, I know that I going to go soon. If they succeed they'll sing all night underneath the autumn moon. The end is here and they want my soul, won't you listen for the songs from the hills. Can you hear the call of the whippoorwills?

DAOLOTH

Words by Ramsey Campbell. Ramsey Campbell: Voice. Steve Lines: FX.

(Words used by kind permission of Ramsey Campbell.)

Daoloth is truth.

Before the eyes and minds of men shrank from all about them and within themselves was Daoloth. Daoloth knows all names and is all names, and all names are Its name. All things within the universe, and all which are beyond and so are part thereof, must yield their true names to the power of Daoloth. He who utters the name Daoloth shall hear Its voice in all things and so learn their names. As those names are called in Its name, so must those called shed the cloak which men have draped about them and reveal their veritable aspect in Daoloth.

Words by Steve Lines and Childe Roland. Music by Childe Roland. Childe Roland: Vocals and all instruments.

There are creatures in these walls, I hear them every night. I sometimes see them out to play in the candlelight.

I'll take the draught oblivion before I'll dare to dream. Brown Jenkin with his terrible teeth is waiting there for me.

It had what looked like human hands, and features old and wise, The face was after all human with shining evil eyes.

The fur against my skin, the whispers in my sleep, the breath so warm but strangely dead, the pain impressed so deep.

DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA

Words by Steve Lines. Music by Rod Goodway. Rod Goodway: Voice and all instruments.

I gazed upon those vast nightmare spires lighted by the pallid boreal sun, which stand as sentinels to forbidden secrets, and run far into remote spheres of dream: where frozen fires burn and visions of cyclopean towers confound the eye. Into subterranean depths I descended, far beneath brooding monoliths and ramparts fretted like demons teeth, where the mournful polar wind is but a distant cry.

Through aeon dead passageways, whose strange angled planes twisted my gaze, I journeyed ever deeper, traversing sunken catacombs like some dreaming sleeper, wandering within the planet's living veins. At length I came upon a vast gulf and the shores of a sunless sea. A black abyss of darkness where the Shoggoths call to me.

Sister Midnight, Sister Midnight, one that shuns the earthly daylight, one that never learnt to pray right, nails that scratch and teeth meant to bite. She's your curse......is Sister Midnight, Sister Midnight, claws your eyes and you'll have no sight, haunts your mind and you'll die of fright, raise your fists but you still can't fight. She's the worst......is Sister Midnight, Sister Midnight, dances in the crimson moonlight, craving blood all through the long night, walks upright when she has no right. She's your curse is......Sister Midnight, Sister Midnight.

I gazed in stunned horror at the canvas on the wall and held out my brandy glass as my host began to pour me yet another drink, my hand shaking and unsure. Never had I seen such work, which at once appalled and fascinated with an unholy, nameless dread. It was Copp's Hill Burying Ground and from broken tombs canine creatures crawled from unknown catacombs. They were ghouls feeding, he said.

The faces! Oh those faces! Etched with sardonic glee they leered from the canvas as they gnawed decaying bones and performed obscene blasphemies amid the rotting stones. But it wasn't Pickman's painting which really unsettled me. No, it was as I left his room, shaken and unsure, I thought I glimpsed beneath his sleeve a brown-furred canine paw!

It was found by Obed Marsh on some nameless isle and brought back to Innsmouth, where in time it came to me; a broach of weird and strange design, which corresponded to no earthly style. There were carven figures cut into the gold, with fish like eyes and contorted limbs; twisting, writhing nightmare things, which no sane artisan would mould.

Now at night my sleep is haunted by dreams of sunken monoliths lost beneath the foamy brine, and from the mists of memory it seems this broach has been and always will be mine. In nightmares I hear the Deep Ones as they beckon me; soon I shall join them in R'lyeh beneath the sea.

In the graveyard of the delicate prey whose destiny is an empty cup, today and tomorrow and the beautiful baptism of spring lie in troubled slumber; whilst beyond fields known and deep in gnarled-forests measureless and black depths uncharted, and the enchanted stars - which are both threshold and barrier shut-fast, stormclouds, as deadly as a knife, quicken.

Above the toiling lanterns hung in the bell towers of the deaf and blind and struck numb stormclouds blaze, hurling nests of rancorous shades; and the rain, laden with fiendish reprisals, rages.

This is the season of Their Return; the flung-open days and months, and strange aeons of the Old Ones lost in despairing deliriums have passed--

Five candles burned the whole time, at the five points of the star. They never went out. The man standing in the middle was tall, his forehead taut. His shirt was once white but had yellowed to reflect the moon and the dark sky above the twisted trees outside the window. Inside there was only that great empty room with the single star, the five candles and the man.

Also there was the book which the man knelt to read at the centre of the star. Book of the Damned. It told of other worlds, and the man summoned them. He had visions, visions in the smoke of the candles, in the light of the moon which shone on the dull dark floor of the room. The patterns on the walls swirled in the candlelight and in the moonlight..

Worlds bloomed and withered, spun and stopped, flourished and decayed. In the smoke of the candles. But they were all the same. All of them had different colours just as the one he knew, and different seasons: each beat like a hunted heart.

Those distant hills they call to me, beyond their peaks lie mystery. There are strange kingdoms I have heard at the edge of the world, where jewelled spires rise beneath unearthly skies.

I have been there in dreams, where opal cities gleam in sunset shimmering and twilight glimmering. Where creatures dance in hidden dells to the chimes of silver bells.

There are Gods behind the clouds who wear thunderheads like shrouds, from their mountain they look down upon the world out to the rim and in temples dark and dim to these Gods I will sing.

I will walk from far to near, they say you can't get there from here, but I have the Silver Key, don't you sit and cry for me. The time has come and I must go far beyond the fields we know...

THE GHOSTS OF CYDONIA

Words by John B. Ford. John B. Ford: Voice. Steve Lines: FX.

(Words used by kind permission of John B. Ford.)

Deathly black vapours rose up from the ground and all around I hear the sound of weeping, my flesh is creeping; night-winds are seeping through my skin, to touch my soul with the breath of sin! And then those dark melodies begin.

Cold Cydonian voices sing of their doom, through forgotten aeons red dust blows to taunt those tortured souls that have no tomb. And through those ancient stones, an awesome power flows.

THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND (demo)

Words and Music by Steve Lines: Arranged by Childe Roland. Childe Roland: Vocals and all instruments.

Standing on the shore near a sea of dark despair, high on a cliff, alone it does stand. The front door is open for any who may dare, enter the House on the Borderland.

The whispering wind rolls in off the waves, weeping with the voices of the lost and the damned and in every window a sad and lonely face, lost in the House on the Borderland.

I know in my heart there's a room there for me, with a view of the ocean as it washes on the sand. The time is drawing near when I'll walk by that sea and enter the House on the Borderland.

And I'll walk its halls and its secrets I will learn: The House on the Borderland. After all this time I will finally return to my House on the Borderland.

We saw it from the roof of our offices: twilight over a Warwickshire town in late morning; and a flickering crescent of the sun drowning in blankness.

They say it brought people together, but I thought of an isolated Earth driven in its orbit, like a madman sleeping and rising in a filthy house.

For the next hour, I blinked at a reddish disc in my vision: not the sun, but the eclipse. And I thought about you - star-gazer, dreaming explorer of the worlds without light; a lost, shuttered universe created by a senile God. Reporter of the endarkened age, your words have filled my head for twenty years, framing the night behind this smoke-painted sky. We would not have been friends. Your letters scare me more than your stories: wave upon wave of cold bigotry and hatred, tipped with the broken ice of jargon. Objectively speaking, the Semitic race... You praised Hitler's vision, but died before he could show the world what prejudice means. We know objectivity is the mask of horror.

At the end of this century, your vision still speaks to us; and so does your blindness. I look up at the burning sky, and can see nothing but eclipse.

MIDNIGHT SUN

Words and music by Steve Lines. Childe Roland: Vocals and acoustic guitars.

PETITION: TO TSATHOGGUA

Words by Richard L. Tierney. Robert M. Price: Voice. Steve Lines: FX.

All praise to thee, Tsathoggua, dark lord of darksome realms! Before thine ebon throne lost wraiths bewail their fate with many an echoing groan and wander sightless through the frightful glooms of sub-Eiglophian caves. Thou didst reward their unrepented, insolence displayed before thy toadlike templed eidolons, with monstrous dooms. From them thy vengeance was not stayed, nor shall their horrid punishments abate ‘till all the peaks of high Voormithadreth are ground to grit in icy eschatons.

Oh lord of foulsome life and fearsome death, to thee our fealty repays our gift of necromantic arts with offerings of red and pulsing hearts given in thanks on thine ensanguined alter; and, to avenge all crass impiety, our serpent-venomed dirks will never falter.

Now hear our plea, O Lord of black encaverned spaces, whose jet-dark orbs, though night-enmired yet see into all secret subterranean places, and whose black-furred bat-supple ears detect the faintest sound of all who plot in chambers underground: Fulfill our hopes allay our direst fears. Grant us the gift of swift nocturnal stealth: Reveal to us each hidden jewelled hoard of kingly wealth; and most of all Dark Lord, possess our foes with terrors thanatopic and draw their shrieking souls down from the light into eternal night to pine for aye in silence nyctalopic.

Beyond a gulf in the subterranean night a passage leads to a wall of massive bricks, and beyond the wall rises Y'golonac to be served by the tattered eyeless figures of the dark. Long has he slept beyond the wall, and those which crawl over the bricks scuttle across his body never knowing it to be Y'golonac; but when his name is spoken or read he comes forth to be worshipped or to feed and take on the shape and soul of those he feeds upon. For those who read of evil and search for its form within their minds call forth evil, and so may Y'golonac return to walk among men and await that time when the earth is cleared off and Cthulhu rises from his tomb among the weeds, Glaaki thrusts open the crystal trapdoor, the brood of Eihort are born into daylight, Shub-Niggurath strides forth to smash the moon-lens, Byatis bursts forth from his prison, Daoloth tears away illusion to expose the reality concealed behind.

They were familiar to me in some repulsive way, and yet I could not name any of them. If I had known these people, whose images were carved into rock a billion years old, they were different now, changed. Altered. Some had brows stretched high and forced out, echoes of our supposed simian history. Others had huge bulging eyes, as if they had seen something unknowable and the ghastly sight could not be contained. Spiders and beetles scurried across the faces in shadowy abandon, and from the corner of my eye I caught sight of a twitching cheek here, a blinking eye there.

And then I saw a face I did recognise. It was twisted out of shape, and I realised suddenly that the distortion had not yet happened, but was soon to come.

The face glaring back at me, moodily inert, was my own.

DREAMHOUND (demo)

Words by Steve Lines. Music by Brian Voth. Brian Voth: Vocals and all instruments.

Betrayed by dreams I wander weirdling ways, beneath the fronds of palms in jungles old when Earth herself was young and brave and bold. Where hybrid blooms sway serpentine I gaze on ruins which no other eyes have seen, whose black foundations sink in primal green, a-crawl with efts of prehistoric days.

Beyond odd-angled ruins ceaseless pound the waves of frenzied ocean freshly borned, which never yet Man's ancestor have spawned, and here I find strange mysteries profound: these monoliths of which I stand in awe - who builded them upon this ancient shore? And what wild secrets have the ages drowned?

From books in waking worlds I know the name of such a city lost in oceans deep, where Ancient Ones in unquiet slumbers keep the lore of dark dimensions and the flame of elder magicks burning, 'til a time when upward from the aeon-silted slime vast shapes will come - as once before they came.

Aye, and that fane of evil was R'lyeh where dreaming Cthulhu lies in chains that bind, sending his nightmares out to humankind, drowning their noble dreams in nameless mire. And dreaming still I start as from the pile snake tentacular arms and in a while - a face that crowns the bulk of Evil's Sire!

Words and Music by Steve Lines: Arranged by Childe Roland. Childe Roland: Vocals and instruments.

WHEN THEY RETURN

Words by Steve Lines. Steve Lines: Voice, keyboards, FX.

They lie awake in the unending night whilst uncounted epochs slowly unfold and, talking in their tombs, they mould mankind's dreams. When stars come right thresholds will crumble, torn asunder. They will be free, who were once chained. As seals will crack, their power drained, the skies will split with rolling thunder.

Dark light will spill from the shattered sun and planets scream in mad confusion, as they fall to Earth in wild profusion, A strange new aeon will have begun. I will laugh as mankind's cities burn and greet the Old Gods when they return!